Online publishers publish various content including text, image, video and audio. An online publisher may want to publish a particular image in various color schemes, patterns, layouts, etc. For example, an online art merchant may want to publish a sculpture image captured using a camera online. However, the merchant may want to enhance the image in a particular way before the image is published online to demand a buyer's attention. The merchant may want to generate multiple images showing specific portions of the sculpture.
Current publishing techniques typically require the merchant to generate a version of the particular image for each of the different ways the merchant wishes to publish the image. For example, if the merchant wishes to highlight only the portion of the image having the sculpture, the surrounding portions of the sculpture in the image may have to be blurred. In another example, if the merchant wishes to show how the sculpture looks in a particular decor, the surrounding portions of the sculpture in the image may also have to be shown. This requires the merchant to have different version of the images which serves different purposes. This can be a time consuming process since all versions have to be generated before they are published.
Certain service providers provide image processing services to the online publishers. The image processing services typically obtain a source image from the online publisher and perform processing the source image to generate various versions of the image. The source images are typically large files, e.g., ranging from tens of megabytes to hundreds of megabytes. To transport such large image files from the online publisher systems to systems of the image processing services consume significant computing resources, e.g., network bandwidth, and can result in increased network consumption costs. The problem increases by many folds if the images published by the online publishers are changing often as the image processing system has to obtain the source images often. Further, in many cases such large source image files may not be necessary to generate the required processed images. For example, if the processed images are typically presented on smaller screen mobile devices, then obtaining the source image, which is a high resolution image and is of hundreds of megabytes may not be necessary and is not an efficient use of the computing resources of the image processing system.